experts on nuclear power

from
this blog

Track the performance of various expert voices addressing the nuclear crisis in Japan and you’ll get a pretty good sense of the magnitude of this problem. For a complex example of the problem's dimensions: a blog post from an MIT professor that was originally sent to his friends and family to offer an explanation of the reactor's design and of nuclear power, but that also expressed in no uncertain terms the opinion that there would be and could not be any significant release of radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. Since that time, the post's author has offered an intelligent retrospective analysis of his own credibility or lack thereof, and his work has been incorporated into a wider effort to “clean up” the expert assessment in a more useful ongoing resource for public understanding.

I don't want to single out this author as a conspiracist, and I appreciate his effort to rethink and recontextualize his initial entry into the public debate, something that other highly vocal experts who were quick to debunk fears about the Japanese accident have not done. The problem with expert participation in the online public sphere is not just that our information can iterate wildly across a wide domain almost instantly. It is also that the online public sphere is absolutely loaded with people who really do use their status as experts to serve as mouthpieces for some kind of paymaster outside of their own universities: researchers who shill for Big Pharma, experts who are peddling some rent-a-solution into the NGO ipeline for implementation in development work, and so on. It is not wrong to view a lot of public expertise coming from university faculty with skepticism.

A public intellectual has to engage issues of public concern earlessly, but they also have to try and live by the code of a ronin, to be a masterless samurai, not out of shame or inability to find a patron but because that's what inquiry requires.